6 The Golden Age of Piracy, 1714–​1727

The dawn circa 1714 hardly accorded with the recent peace many people trusted would quiet the seas forever. Their hopes were quickly dashed in the “breach of the treaty of Peace and Commerce.” Off on the horizon, warriors plundered the fishery with renewed intensity, abducting mariners, capturing ships, and torching stages. Trade ships also fell prey to the sea raiders who showed no discrimina- tion in their “Seizures made of divers[e] ‌Vessells.” As the victims staggered to re- gain their composure, an imposing man-​of-​war lumbered into view demanding answers from Indians but receiving only bold and plainspoken reminders of the proper order of things in this “their ancient possession,” of ascendancy and ac- quiescence, authority and deference. They declared that they will “no longer suffer any other nation to claim or enjoy usage of these lands,” that “ye Lands are theirs and they can make Warr and peace when they please,” and they did so an- imated by the lessons of recent loss. Elsewhere the self-​proclaimed rulers could be seen collecting duties from fishermen trawling their waters and from “every English trader” anchoring in their harbors.1 A decade later, onlookers would have taken in a wider panorama of vio- lence and new depths of despair. Sea raiders everywhere were hijacking “an in- finite number” of sloops, schooners, and shallops, many of which reappeared as warships “cruizing upon the Banks” to “infest” the fishery, like the “Extraordenar[il]y well fitted” schooner who “Takes all she Can Come up with.” Two of the vessels, converted into blazing infernos and launched with their “sails full,” crept toward a coastal garrison as others shelled the settlers and soldiers who took refuge inside. In every direction colonial crews were made “Prisoners,” captives impressed into service or whisked off to be sold for cash. These were the fortunate ones. Others met the end, their bodies abandoned to the deep as fellow crewmen—​now “Hostages”—watched​ from the decks of their new floating prisons. In drifted a boat loaded with frightened vigilantes regretting their decision to set out in pursuit of their stolen property and people. Soon

Storm of the Sea: Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail. Matthew R. Bahar, Oxford University Press (2019). © Matthew R. Bahar. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190874247.003.0007

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after spying an Indian rig on the horizon with its artillery trained on them, the volunteers came unhinged from the unremitting anxiety and quickly turned to flee, “afraid to engage them.”2 The people who watched this dawn would have also heard the familiar sounds of violence. The booming reports of “great guns,” the sharp crackle of “swivel guns,” the dull splintering of masts, the metallic clashing of “Cutlasses,” “Axes,” “knives,” and “hatchets,” the shredding sails, the waves. But most gripping would have been the human sounds, as “very bold” and “incensed” warriors bore down on their prizes with a “severe Command,” in the dictates of others who “Seiz,” “force,” “order,” and “command” their human spoils, in the threats of those who “demand money” as “Tribute” from fishermen and traders. They were bragging again, this time about how they aimed to “joyne more and go and Surprize the Governour and Garrison of Annapolis Royall.”3 The tone of prerogative and impunity taken in at this dawn was a stark contrast to the supplications for help that soon pierced the air. The “distressed people in Marblehead” who could not find a way out of their “Deplorable Surcomstances.” The “terrified” fishermen and their families at Canso who were just assaulted “in the dead of night.” They “suffered very Considerablie.” They were overcome with “cowardice and folly.” They were “so very uneasy” and “very backward.” From the left and right, near and far, the supplications for “emediate meas- ures,” “some speedy and effectual methods,” “all proper Methods,” echoed over the water and faded to silence as their authors waited for some sort of “relief,” anything. The broken remains of the fishing crews were again cowered together ashore, refusing to “go East of this place or scarce to sea.” Their abandonment of the fishery left it totally “impracticable.” Next to them were wives and children and mothers who looked to sea and contemplated the possibility that they will never see their men again and be forced into the growing ranks of “Widdows and fatherless.” No one could muster the nerve to venture out there and face the “Irruptions,” the “Attacks and Barbarities,” the “divers[e]‌ barbarous acts of hos- tility,” the “Great and Many damages.”4 These parallel scenes frame Wabanakia’s longest, most intense, and most pro- ductive campaign of maritime violence to date. The era of ongoing conflict with the English, from the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 through the end of Father Rale’s War in 1727, forms the subject of this chapter. During these years Wabanaki adapted to and then manipulated the borderlands’ new geopolitics dictated by the Treaty of Utrecht by modernizing their diplomatic and military strategy for regional ascendancy. The process of modernization was threefold. In no uncer- tain terms, Indians applied their historic claim to sovereignty over sea and shore to the new postwar world while also amplifying their insistence on the tribu- tary status of English neighbors. As much as Europeans might wish to remap the region, Indians insisted on the right order of things. At the same time, they

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detached their seaborne campaigning from wars rooted in the distant power circles of European courts, from conflicts touched off by imperial priorities that increasingly seemed arbitrary and unpredictable. The new face of Wabanaki’s hegemonic ambition was born of a desire to unfetter the political and economic fortunes of Native communities from those of Europe. The Treaty of Utrecht proved to Indians that something needed to change. Its concessions to English interests in the American northeast marked a jarring departure from the continuity and equilibrium maintained by the Treaty of Ryswick after the War of the League of Augsburg fifteen years earlier. At Utrecht, French and English diplomats dealt in Native territory as if they possessed mean- ingful authority over it, carving, trading, and claiming lands and subjects in the name of their kings. France ceded most of Acadia to England, after French aid to local Indians floundered throughout the war. Included in the deal was Port Royal, established over a hundred years earlier by Samuel de Champlain and the revered sagamore Membertou. England claimed it as Annapolis Royal, capital of their new colony, Nova Scotia. The sea change dealt a blow to Wabanaki interests as it undercut a century-​long struggle to subjugate English colonialism along the confederacy’s southern frontier. That the setback arose in spite of the devastating achievements won by marine-warriors​ in the late war only further vexed Native leaders. The Treaty of Utrecht exposed the limitations of their nautical approach to establishing Dawnland dominion.5 What emerged as a revanchist commitment to control the territory of Nova Scotia soon engulfed much of the northeast in a maelstrom of seaborne violence as Indians assaulted English ships and sailors from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Maine. The raiding began on the fishing banks off Nova Scotia within a year of the Utrecht accord, but by the early 1720s warriors to the south were also taking to the sea to counter renewed pressure from New England. Tensions between encroaching colonists and native communities in southern Maine reached a fe- vered pitch when Massachusetts militia forces attacked a noncombatant village in search of its resident Jesuit priest in the spring of 1722, sparking a three-​year war between New England and Wabanaki forces over territorial sovereignty and political authority. The outbreak of Father Rale’s War at Norridgewock galvanized Indians throughout the borderlands into a militarized community. Warriors from the Kennebec River in the southwest to Cape Breton Island in the northeast coordinated their naval campaigns to rein in defiant English subjects and reestablish the balance of power. The conflict revealed just how integrated the confederacy had become. The sea raids openly and deliberately defied the Treaty of Utrecht. Indians made clear that they were not beholden to agreements struck by foreign statesmen on the far side of the Atlantic. Nor would they wait idly for the next European war to arrive on their shores. Only they possessed the authority to

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make violence and peace in the land of their ancestors. Henceforth, their quest for dominion over the northeast would be waged on their own terms. Wabanaki hegemony post-​Utrecht took on a decidedly pecuniary edge. Throughout the 1710s and 1720s they stormed English ships and demanded monetary gifts, they abducted and commodified English mariners, and they sold their English prizes to French buyers for staggering cash sums. Money offered Indians what their now meager fur supply no longer could: flexibility, stability, and security. Unlike beaver hats in the promenades and salons of Europe, cash in currency-​starved North America never went out of style.6 The increasingly high-​stakes enterprise of sea raiding privileged native elites who could master the nautical skills and virtues valorized in Wabanaki communities. Headmen responded to the shifting needs of their constituents and the tenuous nature of their own authority by positioning themselves and their offspring at the cutting edge of economic change. On the contested waters of the northwest Atlantic able seamanship and naval prowess provided the surest route to a community’s material and social stability and, as a result, to the pres- tige and authority of their own bloodline. Though the water offered all hunters an escape from a dying fur trade, it was headmen who captained the crews and flotillas of their confederacy, often with their children alongside them. The most successful amassed sizeable fleets that became fixtures in northeastern waters and specters in colonial discourse. The new Wabanaki sagamore of the eight- eenth century was foremost a master of the sea. To his victims he was a pirate. In their struggle to combat the latest outbreak of assaults, English authorities from Boston to Annapolis Royal to London em- ployed a tried and tested language of piracy that reduced Wabanaki to socially and politically primitive criminals. It was a war of words waged with the only weapons England could part with from its wider crusade against seafaring crime. It was also fought with paradoxical goals. The language of piracy disparaged and delegitimized Indian sea raiding at the same time that it elevated its destructive potential in an attempt to garner support for its suppression. In the end it revealed just how desperate imperial officials had become to rid themselves and their col- onies of what Colonel Thomas Westbrook from Massachusetts called “the Indian Enterprises at sea,” but what everyone else described as a great scourge.7 The cries of fear and condemnation from all ranks of imperial society were nothing new in the 1720s, nor were the ad hoc solutions that regularly accompanied them. What distinguished this bout of protest and supplication was its ever-​widening scope and amplifying intensity, for victims in America and metropolitan Britain sensed a new gravity to the problem. Even with this heightened sense of urgency, though, colonists’ appeals for deliverance could by now only have been half-​hearted. Each request was sent despite the unlikelihood of any meaningful reply, yet colonists cast them and then they waited for some

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sort of help, against what Massachusetts militia officer Samuel Penhallow began referring to as “this storm of the enemy by sea.”8

◆ ◆ ◆​ The confederacy paid a price ashore for its gains afloat during the War of Spanish Succession. Displacement and destruction accompanied Massachusetts’ land-​based assaults, France’s wavering commitment to its native allies, and the woodlands’ dire resource crisis. Indians who had come to rely on French weapons from Acadia and Quebec to manage English colonialism from New England confronted strategic challenges as the supply of foreign aid dried up with France’s wartime misfortunes. Many native families in southwestern Maine, those nearest English authority in Massachusetts, migrated north in pursuit of security and stability in the French mission villages along the St. Lawrence River. Others opting to stay behind struggled with disease, starvation, and the violence of colonial rangers commissioned to hunt them down. As Wabanaki came to terms with their changing circumstances at the war’s end in 1713, they reached a new set of conclusions about their diplomatic and naval policies and the world they aimed to achieve with them. One conclusion involved a troubling character revelation. Indians watched the warm and tender heart of the French king harden over the course of the war. Their incessant objections to the second-​rate quality and paltry quantity of presents trickling out of New France gave colonial leaders ample cause for alarm. Just a few months into the conflict in 1702, Acadian governor Jacques-​François Monbeton de Brouillan was already relaying messages to Paris about the “poor quality” of goods sent to the Kennebec River Indians and urging a full-​scale inves- tigation of the matter. Standards failed to improve over the coming years. Daniel d’Auger de Subercase, Brouillan’s successor, reported to metropolitan officials in 1706 that recent deliveries of Indian gifts lacked “essential goods . . . for their subsistence.” Another seven years of warfare so ravaged France’s war chest that Paris began recalling the funds for Indian merchandise it had earlier apportioned to Quebec. “The difficulties of sustaining a war,” ministry officials reminded the governor, called for desperate measures. By then Wabanaki had accepted a diffi- cult lesson. The king’s heart was far from the gushing wellspring of benevolence and generosity that it once seemed.9 Further souring native attitudes toward the French was the Treaty of Utrecht. In the 1713 peace agreement, France relinquished its claims to most of Acadia, including the capital of Port Royal, retaining only Ile-​Royale (Cape Breton Island) and Ile-​St. Jean (later Prince Edward Island). England in turn possessed a new colony: Nova Scotia. To Indians not privy to the conference negotiations, all of it was a sellout by allies who refused to recognize native sovereignty over their ancestral homelands. Wabanaki diplomats, traders, and warriors who had

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orchestrated a century-long​ campaign to contain and exploit unwieldy English neighbors to the southwest found themselves bordered by a new English pres- ence to the northeast. Indians cut down English confidence by amplifying declarations of sover- eign authority. “All the Articles are in favour of the English Interest Everywhere,” Massachusetts officials pointed out to Wabanaki shortly after the treaty’s ratifi- cation in early 1713. “All the negotiation of peace in Europe as well as here is at the Instance of the french king.” When colonial leaders recycled the rhetoric to justify their claims to native lands a few years later, Indians retorted that they were “not subjects of the French, but only their allies.” Those from the Kennebec responded to “ye news of peace” by similarly clarifying their relationship to the French in front of English diplomats at Casco Bay. They would “wholly re- nounce the French Interest,” the Indians stated, because “ye French had deceivd & drawn them in” to the late war.10 Indians declared their independence from France not simply to indulge the stronger of two European neighbors but to reaffirm their autonomy in an uncer- tain postwar world. This revanchist commitment to sovereignty explained why Wabanaki in the St. Lawrence River missions returned to their homelands after the war despite the persistent objections of French civil authorities. Jesuit mis- sionary Sebastian Rale supported the return migration as an escape from the corrupting influence of liquor-​plying fur traders and settlers near the missions. But the migrants were also responding to economic incentives. The supply of French presents continued to shrink after the war while the prices of French trade goods swelled to new heights. Indians from the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers pressured their kin to abandon the mission village of Becancourt “if the French continue to sell merchandise as expensive as they have in the past several years.” One Wabanaki trader “clearly declared” to Quebec officials that “if they are not provided for,” his people will keep their beaver until the spring and “search out better markets.” French leaders scouting new settlement sites on Ile-​Royale after their eviction from Port Royal encountered locals just as pushy. When an en- gineer asked nearby Mi’kmaq for assistance with the construction of a fort, the Indians considered the request and then “demanded payment in advance of their services.”11 Their continued antipathy toward English authority together with their new disillusionment with French imperialism compelled Indians to reassess and ultimately redouble their maritime strategy. Confined to wars rooted in faraway places and arcane disputes, their nautical campaigning failed to stabi- lize the world they long envisioned for themselves. Tethering the campaigns to the schemes of fickle and unpredictable European empires inhibited its po- tential. The strategy had simply become too contingent on external variables. Liberating it from the tentacles of arbitrary imperial politics, and rendering it

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more consistent with their renewed commitment to cultural and economic au- tonomy, could better serve Native interests in a postwar world. Wabanaki fashioned and articulated a new political identity in unabashedly militant terms. Their diplomatic rhetoric and predatory violence assumed an audacity of brutal proportions, the intensity of which Europeans had come to expect only during wartime. The lashing plagued English fishermen, settlers, and officials longer than any prior conflict and inflicted a magnitude of loss pre- viously unknown. Its first outbreak came so soon after the peace treaty that its victims believed they were experiencing the aftershocks of the recent past. But this was the beginning of something new.

◆ ◆ ◆​ Indians detached their blue-water​ strategy from European politics by defying the Treaty of Utrecht within a year of its ratification. Warriors from Richibucto attacked and seized “a trading vessell” near Beaubassin on the Bay of Fundy in the summer of 1714. Perhaps well equipped from the windfall in pieces of eight that turned up in the community a few years earlier, the Indians easily took com- mand of the ship from its New England master, John Adams, before pillaging the cargo valued at seventy pounds. Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Thomas Caulfeild launched an inquiry into what he condemned as a “breach of the treaty of Peace and Commerce.” The Indians pointed out that they did not care much for European treaties. They “have nott as yett heard of the peace being concluded upon between the two Crowns,” and even if they had, they “are of oppinion that they are nott Included in ye treatys of peace and Commerce,” a native spokesman informed Caulfeild. Whatever Europeans discussed among themselves at Utrecht had no binding authority here.12 The few English officials who had the misfortune of being stationed at Annapolis Royal in 1714 knew that their isolated outpost of a colony was hardly in a position to enforce compliance to the treaty. So they did what they could and issued a warning, actually a written word of caution, dispatched to Richibucto’s resident French priest. Indians promptly ignored it. Warriors had extended their assaults to the fishery that autumn, overpowering vessels armed for defense. “They pillage and loot the English ships,” nearby French officials reported to Paris, and remain “so committed to preventing the English from fishing in these waters or occupying the land.” The French liked to think of the violence as resist- ance to a mutual enemy, but Indians saw their actions as part of a much wider and longer struggle conceived during Madockawando’s leadership to reduce and integrate non-​Natives into Wabanaki society.13 The following summer warriors from communities scattered along Nova Scotia’s southeastern coasts and islands orchestrated several “Irruptions,” com- mitted “Divers Hostilitys,” and inflicted “Great and Many damages” on His

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Majesty’s “fishermen belonging to ye Government of New England.” The innu- merable “Seizures made of divers Vessells” along with the kidnapping of English crews quickly overshadowed the sporadic violence of the previous fishing season. Startling reports about “ye Sloops ye Indians had taken from ye fishermen” flooded the desks of governors and legislators in Boston and Annapolis Royal.14 Marine-warriors​ made an aggressive stand on regional waters in an effort to create the right first impression on Nova Scotia. The extreme losses Native communities sustained at the hands of English enemies in the recent war fu- eled their determination to exact retribution. Near Mackadome Island in 1715, for example, warriors not only “plundered” a ship belonging to Captain Wright, but also “killed ye Doctor of ye Ship” and cut “ye Shipps Rigging and Sailes in peices.” The survivors washed ashore on a nearby island where they managed to salvage “the remains that ye Indians left” before being rescued by an English sloop. Other warriors threatened Boston seaman Cyprian Southack with a similar fate that summer after he attempted to establish a fishing base in southern Nova Scotia without first consulting their leader. Headed by local sagamore Jo Muse, the war- rior party trumpeted news that they had just captured several fishing vessels in the area, intended “to destroy all the English Fishery on that Coast,” and finally “would come to take me & all I had & would kille me.” Southack took the hint and began packing. Three years later, he had evidently recovered enough from the confronta- tion to launch a second attempt, but his ship ran aground in the same area. When the Indians discovered it, “they set the Sloop on Fire, & burnt her up.”15 The reflexive fury these attacks induced in colonial leaders soon gave way to nervous anxiety as they listened to Indians justify the depredations in un- apologetically bellicose terms. When questioned about the assaults, Native spokesmen continued to dictate the limits of European authority and insist on their unmitigated right to do whatever they wanted within their own territory. No foreign power would stop them. Indians made sure to convey this to the new English occupiers. After warriors escalated their plundering operations in summer 1715, Nova Scotia leaders tried to stymie the momentum with the HMS Rose, a man-​of-​war on emer- gency loan from the Royal Navy to shuttle Commissaries Peter Capon, Colonel Gaffe, and Captain Caly on a fact-​finding mission along the coast. The wel- come they received there was both terse and evasive. Several headmen declared unequivocally that “ye Lands are theirs and they can make Warr and peace when they please.” The commissioners jotted it down and moved on. Other settlements concurred, announcing that “they have the power to make vio- lence” anywhere they wished in their ancestral territory. Still others “declared boldly to the English” their “resolution to conserve their ancient possession and no longer suffer any other nation to claim or enjoy usage of these lands.” TheRose made its way back to Annapolis Royal where the delegation promptly

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debriefed officials on the startling intelligence. The Treaty of Utrecht may have recognized Britain’s conquest of French Acadia, but after just two years the conquerors in the borderlands were beginning to resemble the subjects Madockawando envisioned in the 1670s.16 Not even the best efforts of the French could curtail the new outburst of Wabanaki aggression. Ile-​Royale governor Philippe Pastour de Costebelle struggled repeatedly to suppress the sea raids and disprove English suspicions of French involvement, only to discover that his native allies were more like acquaintances. The Indians of the Acadian coast “are so irreconcilable to the English that all of our urgings for peace cannot prevent them from disrupting the commerce there,” he informed Paris in the fall of 1714. The governor finally gave up a year later after running into further “difficulty with the Indians who take every opportunity to pillage the English.” He met with Commissary Peter Capon that fall and “reassured him that the French do not approve in any way” of the native “acts of hostility against the English ships at sea.” They are wholly “contrary to the wishes of the Crown,” Costebelle stressed.17 France’s Mi’kmaq allies operated independently of European imperial strategizing, to be sure, but the sea raids of 1715 were also part and parcel of a wider diplomatic campaign carefully attuned to the intricacies of royal poli- tics across the Atlantic. Indians launched their assaults to achieve greater com- mand over what seemed like an increasingly unpredictable rivalry between England and France. From Pubmacoup and Le Have to Chibucto, Marlegash, and Mackadome, the native communities of Acadia all conveyed the same in- telligence to Commissary Peter Capon aboard the Rose. From news brought by “some of ye fishermen,” Indians related, their people had learned of the “great Tumults in Great Brittain, and Warr expected to be proclaimed Speedily.” But rather than wait for the conflict to come to them, the Indians “resolved to beginn [it] first.” Colonial leaders who wondered what exactly Indians meant when they said things like “ye Lands are theirs and they can make Warr and peace when they please,” or “they have the power to make violence” anywhere they please, now had an example to help clarify things.18 The “great Tumults in Great Brittain” that Wabanaki referenced in 1715 be- came Britain’s first major Jacobite rebellion. Stuart sympathizers at home and abroad had recently invaded Scotland in a coup d’état they hoped would culmi- nate in the recovery of the English throne from the Hanoverian dynasty. The seat belonged to the son of James II, the rebels believed, the Catholic king deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By igniting another Atlantic conflagration, this time on their own terms, Wabanaki aimed to manipulate Europe’s dynastic affairs and reinforce their own political ascendancy.19 The Rebellion of ‘15 presented Indians with an opportunity to resurrect the bond that once knit their communities to the House of Stuart, emboldening

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them with new hope for the containment of English colonialism in the American northeast. Their faith persisted long after the revolution’s swift demise. Four years later, Indians from Father Sebastian Rale’s mission at Norridgewock were still trying to convince local English settlers that “King George was not the right King,” that “he came in at the back doar, and that there was another who was the right heir to the Crown.” Penobscot Indians similarly insisted on calling the English monarch “King James” as late as 1764, since, they explained, it was “from James 1st in whose reign New England was first peopled.” The pro-​French House of Stuart served as a critical element of Wabanaki ascendancy in the northeast.20 Though the Jacobites fell short of their objectives in 1715, Indians con- tinued to enforce greater dominion over the northeast’s maritime spaces. In and around these possessions, English colonists were made to recall their status as alien subjects of an indigenous power. At Damaris Cove on the central Maine coast Indians began to “demand money of the English for fishing there,” Massachusetts’ exasperated lieutenant governor learned in summer 1716. By now every fisherman in New England knew that they defied such mandates at his own peril. Wabanaki reminded them of this a few years later when Jonathan Alden’s trade sloop anchored off Minas, Nova Scotia. Local sagamore Peter Nunquaddan boarded the sloop with eleven Indians and apprised the crew of a new tariff policy. Nunquaddan’s customs collectors “demanded fifty livres for liberty to trade saying this Countrey was theirs, and every English Trader should pay Tribute to them.” After Captain Alden’s five-​day grace period elapsed, the headman returned with an even larger posse and “came on board in a Hostile manner.” The force drove Alden and his men ashore and then “Plunder’d his Sloops cargoe to the value of Two hundred and Sixty pounds at least, without any provocation.” Native sovereignty over the ocean and its manifold opportunities resounded with bold aggression.21 By dictating proprietary rights to the sea and commodifying its usage by colonial dependents, Indians asserted their economic autonomy in a north- east increasingly dominated by capricious market forces. Penobscot headman Querrebenuit confronted Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley at a meeting in 1714 after the colony failed in its treaty promise to better regulate the fur trade. The going rates for English trade goods remained volatile, the sagamore noted before requesting that the “prices as formerly for Beaver” be restored. “Whereas formerly wee had Two Yards of Broad Cloth for two skins,” he con- tinued, “now it is three Skins.” Dudley responded by pointing out that the de- mand was plummeting along with the supply. “The price of Beaver is not halfe so much in Great Britain and Europe as some years past,” mostly because “Europe has been along time in a flame with Warrs which has made goods very dear.”22 But nothing solved problems like cash. Indians mitigated the volatility of European market forces not just by commodifying access to their maritime

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spaces but also by securing ready cash with their plunder. The cash nexus pro- vided Indians with the stable and dependable purchasing power that their furs increasingly could not. It liberated Indians from the shackles of distant, imper- sonal, and unpredictable economic processes that somehow determined the value of native goods and labor on a shifting scale. Warriors knew they could get the English to hand over money for their mariners taken captive at sea. The native practice of trafficking colonists to French and English buyers had developed steadily over the previous two imperial conflicts, but the incentives driving the commerce assumed new pecuniary dimensions as Wabanaki adjusted to the northeast’s geopolitics after 1712. Indians from Cape Sable, for example, “seized upon Two fishing Shallops and kept some of ye Crew Hostages till paid of a Demand they have made of £40” in summer 1715. Though unsure of “what reason they give for this Violence,” Major Paul Mascerene quickly relayed the demands to Massachusetts officials desperate to redeem the captives. Other warriors from the same area hijacked several fishing ships a short while later and “kept one Vessell and some men as Hostages (and have sent home ye others) untill they return and bring them Such a Value as they have Sett which we think is about 30 pounds,” two Boston merchants related to a business partner. Penobscot sagamore Espequit executed the same ploy a decade later. In the heat of a growing conflict with Massachusetts, the headman dispatched a few English captives in “his Vessel” to retrieve a ransom from Marblehead for themselves and a host of other prisoners held at Penobscot.23 Indians hit one of their biggest payouts when they decimated the fishery at Canso, Nova Scotia, in August 1720. A shallop with fifteen marine-warriors​ recounted the details to a passing French ship while fingering “about twenty English Crownes . . . in money” that they netted in the raid. Sixty Wabanaki “in the dead of night” had just plundered several English ships laden with merchan- dise, took the crews prisoner, and then came ashore to continue the bonanza. There they “forc’t all the English People to retire on board their Vessels,” one of whom was “drown’d in hast[e] ‌of getting off,” while they pillaged houses and ransacked the magazine. Aboard their combustible prisons, “terrified” fishermen and their families braced for the worst when the warriors began kindling torches. “Several of the Indians were for burning two ships rideing there,” the native informants continued, but a sagamore from Cape Breton dissuaded them. When the smoke cleared, English authorities found two men dead and four wounded, but the loss in property amounted to twenty-​thousand pounds.24 The same law of supply and demand that governed a once-​booming fur trade now encouraged Indians to refocus their pursuits on the harvest of English colonists. Fishermen made the easiest prey. In a twenty-​day span during the summer of 1715, Indians from Cape Sable “seized Eleven Vessels of ours fishing on that Coast & coming into the Harbours . . . and made Prisoners most of

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the fishermen belonging to the said Vessels,” Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley fumed to the Board of Trade. Coastal settlers also made easy targets. Sixty warriors in “twenty canoes” launched an amphibious assault on the com- munity of St. Georges in Maine “where they burnt a sloop” and “took several prisoners” in summer 1722. The same invasion force that fell on St. Georges also cast their nets at nearby Merrymeeting Bay where they “took nine families” cap- tive. Several of the captives were immediately shuttled to markets in Quebec.25 English fishermen disappeared from the waves with such alarming frequency in the 1710s and 1720s that colonial officials devised schemes to lure Indians into open waters with decoy fishermen. After Wabanaki in Maine had become “very bold in Enterprizing & boarding the fishing vessells on the Eastern Shore” in 1724, the Massachusetts militia tossed out the bait. Captain Durrell’s force received instructions to “decoy them by Sounding for Fish & Concealing their Men” below deck until the Indians were enticed into firing range. By “sounding for Fish, Concealing your Men & Appearing in all Respects in such a Manner as may most probably decoy the Enemy,” Captain Sanders was likewise advised, he could draw out Indians lurking among the rocky maze of coastal Maine. Vexed officers and officials continued watching the kidnappings and hijackings reach a frequency unparalleled in recent decades.26 Captives may have turned a respectable profit, but prize ships proved even more valuable for native communities. Indians exploited their postwar rela- tionship with the French at Ile-​Royale by demanding cash payments for vessels commandeered from English owners. Still staggering from their recent loss of Acadia, French leaders accosted by the pushy brokers found themselves in a dif- ficult position. On the one hand they desired to placate their Native neighbors, yet they also wished to avoid any association with what Nova Scotia and Massachusetts were beginning to condemn as piracy. Desperately hoping to both shore up a vital Indian alliance and to avoid creating an international inci- dent, French officials decided to ransom the ships and transfer them to English authorities. It was unclear who the biggest losers were in this black market: the English who had their vessels relentlessly targeted or the French who found their already-​threadbare purse strings relentlessly opened. The new French fortress of Louisbourg on Ile-​Royale served as the central marketplace for Indians eager to cash in their trophies. First, they carefully furnished the vessels with extra amenities drawn from the cargo to impress potential buyers—​but not before keeping what they wanted for their own communities. One seventy-ton​ “prize English ship” came fully loaded with “3 or 400 quintals [fifteen or twenty tons] of cod” and oil that had been seized by thirty Indians in a single attack off the coast of Newfoundland in September 1727. The warriors first sailed the vessel to their settlement on Ile-​Royale where they unloaded cannons, powder, ammunition, and victuals to their kin.

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Then they made haste for Louisbourg with the ship, fish, and oil and hawked it to Governor Joseph de Saint-​Ovide for 3,500 livres. The sellers collected just over two thousand livres of the ransom “in cash,” but “demanded the rest in goods,” probably to furnish their community with necessities they would have eventually purchased anyway. Indians near Port-​Toulouse on Ile-​Royale commandeered two English schooners in 1752 and sailed for Louisbourg where they showcased both vessels along with twenty-​two crewmen taken cap- tive. The Indians pulled in 5,200 livres in the sale. Louisbourg had achieved such infamy as a clearinghouse for stolen ships that when Indians seized a Marblehead shallop off Nova Scotia in the summer of 1725, the colony’s lieu- tenant governor Lawrence Armstrong instinctively dispatched an envoy to the French post to inquire of its whereabouts.27 For the right price, Native negotiators were willing to guarantee the freedom of captain and crew when selling a prize back to its master. Warriors kidnapped a royal customs collector and his personnel off southern Nova Scotia in 1722, paraded his vessel past several native settlements around the Bay of Fundy, plundered it, and finally sold it back to him for a hefty sum. “There came two Cannows with Thirteen Indians on board of me,” ten of whom were tucked away beneath furs, the collector recounted. After restraining his crew, the Indians “commanded me to go up the River St. Johns with my Sloop” where they took on several more of their kin. Now with forty-​five warriors on board, the Indians “forced me to Anchor in uncommon places” on a tour of multiple native communities around the Bay of Fundy. The cruise to these ports of call cost the agent “two Cables and two Anchors,” petty losses compared to the demand of one thousand livres he paid to his abductors for the release of his vessel and the liberty of his crew.28 The staggering net worth of some cargoes raised the stakes for Wabanaki raiders in what was proving to be a relatively low risk, high reward enterprise. For the myriad English merchants, fishermen, and settlers who suffered first- hand from the depredations, the sum totals only intensified the grief. “A large number” of warriors from southern Maine and Nova Scotia combined to attack and seize four English vessels in September 1722, one of which carried a load of furs worth thirty thousand livres, ten times the value of the ship, fish, and oil that Indians would capture and sell in Louisbourg a few years later. Around the same time, a warrior party led by two sagamores hijacked seven ships near Canso transporting some “six hundred quintals [thirty tons] of fish.” The thrilling pros- pect of a rich cargo concealed just below deck, like the anticipation of the hunt in former times, emboldened warriors.29 If a ship or its cargo could satisfy a pressing need in their communities, Indians saw no reason to liquidate their prizes in cash transactions with foreigners. Some retained ships to enhance their fishing and sea hunting pursuits now that mari- time resources were assuming a renewed primacy in their economy. Penobscot

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sagamore Saccaristis told Massachusetts militia officer Thomas Westbrook that “ye Indians fitted out two of the Scooners that they took last Summer & went a fishing & getting Seils [seals] off at Grand Menan and the Mouth of St. Johns River” in the spring of 1725, just after they emerged from their winter hunting camps. Indians from Norridgewock in southern Maine employed an even more efficient harvesting technique when they stocked their community “full of codd fish out of 15 or 16 vessels they have taken” in 1724. Others manipulated their al- liance with the tenuous French colony of Ile-​Royale to procure hunting vessels. Villages near Malpec on Isle St. Jean (Prince Edward Island) secured multiple shallops from officials in 1715 for “hunting sea cows and seals around the Magdelaine islands for their oil.” Seal hunters from Ile-​Royale later convinced Governor Saint-​Ovide to supply them with a pair of shallops “so they can go on their hunt, and provide for their communities.” Within a decade of its founding, Indians were using Louisbourg as both a depository to unload their ships for ready cash and as an embarkation point for their charters.30 To sell or not to sell could be a contentious question in native communities. The Indians who hijacked a seventy-​ton English ship loaded with four hundred quintals of cod near Newfoundland steered immediately for their settlement on Ile-​Royale to confer about the respective merits of retaining the prize or shopping it to the French. Two or three “principal” Indians, Governor Saint-​Ovide noted, built the consensus to sell, but it took some negotiation. Council members ulti- mately agreed to keep the ship’s cannons, shot, powder, and rations and market the ship, fish, and oil at Louisbourg. In their increasingly cash-​based exchanges with Europeans, the commitment of Wabanaki leaders to the collective welfare of the community continued to inform their economic decision making.31 For all its strengths as an instrument of economic power, cash could not fi- nance the confederacy’s necessary work of intimidating competitors and de- manding obeisance from tributaries. Indians had long since integrated sailing technology into their imperial quest—​taking, borrowing, and building vessels to accommodate their interests in the Dawnland. Ships indeed became indis- pensable to Wabanaki maritime power by the early eighteenth century. But be- cause of colonial legal strictures dating back to the previous century, sail was not something Indian money could buy.32 When Indian warriors privileged ships over dollars, they did so to impress their nautical prowess, their authority, and ultimately their sovereignty on European neighbors. Imposed on the Dawnland by the Treaty of Utrecht, the new colony of Nova Scotia epitomized English pretensions in the northeast, and few sites drew Indians’ ire more than the capital, Annapolis Royal. After the suc- cessful assault on Canso in 1720, fifteen Native sea raiders plied a shallop up alongside a French vessel to boast that they “had taken Cansoe and plunder’d it” and that “in a short time they intended to make a visit to Annapolis Royall.”

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When they hijacked the ship of a royal customs collector and took the crew pris- oner two years later, Indians again let on that they were planning to visit the capital. All the details had been carefully attended to, as they bragged to the crew, “in Order to joyne more and go and Surprize the Governour and Garrison of Annapolis Royall.” Governor Phillips of Nova Scotia received further news that “Indians were cruizing upon the Banks with the Sloops they had taken” and “gave out that they were to attack this place with all their strength.” Like Captain Mogg who vaunted of having “found the way to burn boston” in 1676, warriors after the Treaty of Utrecht fired cannonades of threats from their ships not to broadcast actual military plans but to raise a specter of terror in colonial minds.33 For sailing craft to succeed as objects of intimidation and braggadocio they had to be deployed at least occasionally as weapons of physical violence. Wabanaki never tired of showing the English that they had ships and were not afraid to use them. “Having thirty-​nine on board one of the vessels which they had took,” several warriors came up alongside Captain John Elliot’s vessel near Canso and “commanded them to strike for that they were their prize.” A fight then erupted “for about half an hour.” Others bore down on the beaten and bat- tered fishery with their ships. Indians operating out of Penobscot headquarters in 1725 marshaled a fleet amassed in raids over the previous summer to prey on the English. Boston officials wasted no time circulating the news to the garrisons and fishing communities scattered across coastal Maine. “The Indians of Penobscot will speedily be out in the Vessels they took last Summer from the English,” Lieutenant Governor Dummer announced, “& will infest the Eastern Coast to the great Disturbance & Loss of those concerned in the Fishery.” Joint parties of Mi’kmaq and Abenaki likewise “armed two [ships] that they took from the English last summer” and manned them with sixty warriors each in summer 1724. “I have just learned that they have taken eight or ten small fishing vessels,” Governor Saint-​Ovide reported to Paris.34 Native naval tacticians committed their heavily armed ships, skilled sailors, and knowledge of local marine geography to take on New England militia in engagements that often became protracted battles. Volunteers from Piscataqua encountered “the indian Privateer” in July 1724 plying the waters off coastal Maine in “a sconer once of marble head” but now “full of indians Extraordenary well fitted who Chased them 3 hours & shee Takes all she Can Come up with.” Warriors packed seven heavily armed sloops and schooners and locked into “an engagement of several hours” with John Elliot of Topsham off the Nova Scotia coast in 1727. The intensity of the clash was such that Elliot endured “9 Shott in his body” with “some of his wounds so dangerous that his life was for a time much dispared of.” Thomas Cox of Dorchester was serving aboard one of two schooners anchored near the mouth of the Penobscot River in 1724 when his crew spotted another schooner sailing into the harbor and “found them to

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be Indians, Who ask’d us where we were going.” A melee ensued for “about 4 Hours” as Cox’s ship “fired upon them very briskly.”35 Warriors also repurposed their vessels as fire ships to storm land-​based symbols of English authority. Five Indian warships launched an explosive amphibious as- sault on Massachusetts’ northeastern-​most garrison in July 1724, blockading the fort as evening set in while their emissary approached the gates requesting a parley. The messenger began “pointing to the Vessels coming up,” expecting the colo- nial forces to quickly capitulate in the face of such an imposing force. When the garrison’s commanding officer refused to surrender, the Indian promised quarter to the colonists huddled inside, going so far as to guarantee safe passage to Boston in one of the Indian schooners. After two days of offers and counter-​offers, the exasperated Indians prepared their next move. “They put into a cove with one of their Vessels out of our Sight,” the English commander reported, and proceeded to load it with “Wood and Combustible stuff.” Together with another ship simi- larly kindled, the Indians “set it on fire designing to burn the Block House.” Then they launched the inferno “round the Point with her sails full” and watched it bear down on the colonial stronghold while they “kept firing on all sides.” But with the assistance of “a great Gun,” the English fired back and “Sheerd off” the masts of the approaching conflagration, narrowly averting disaster. When the Indians saw “their design frustrated, they left us and went away very silently.”36

◆ ◆ ◆​ The wave of ships pouring into its harbors surged to such heights that Wabanakia’s maritime labor force had difficulty keeping up. Impressments of English mariners into service aboard Indian vessels expanded accordingly in the 1710s and 1720s. Native prize crews regularly doubled as press gangs in an ef- fort to mitigate the imbalance of ships and able seamen in their communities. Yet Indians also valued the cultural symbolism of impressment. By violently kidnapping colonists and putting them to work aboard hijacked ships, warriors forced the English to recall their subservient status as Dawnland dependents. Prisoners taken at sea, like the ships they once crewed, were made to serve the Wabanaki cause as both marketable commodities and conspicuous possessions. Taken together, impressment and militancy comprised a sturdy branch of the confederacy’s revanchist diplomacy after the Treaty of Utrecht. When Indians declared in 1715 that “ye Lands are theirs and they can make Warr and peace when they please,” they proceeded to raid the fishery for captives and plunder to show Europeans exactly what they meant. As English colonists crept back into Maine and others settled into Nova Scotia in the 1720s, Indians amplified their claim to dominion by subjecting more prisoners to servile work aboard their prizes. By 1722, native press gangs were preying on the fishery with such reg- ularity that the governor of Nova Scotia issued a public proclamation alerting

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his colony to the imminent danger. Out of the fishing crews, Richard Phillips announced, the Indians “have made prisoners and Seiz’d their Vessels and Effects, Some of which Vessels they are Said to Man and Cruize on the Coast Daily taking Vessels in a piratical manner with the Assistance of the prisoners whom they take for Sailors.” The impressments resulted in “the great hindrance and Damage of the Fishery as well as the Loss of his Majesties Subjects” whom “they have put to Death.” The proclamation failed to stem the advance. Three months later Phillips was still fuming when news came in that “the Indians were cruizing upon the Banks with the Sloops they had taken assisted by the Prisoners whom they compelled to serve as Mariners.”37 Native dominion over English subjects also found expression in the mockery of pressed sailors and the ensign of imperial authority under which they for- merly served. The Indians who hijacked a vessel and impressed the crew of a royal customs collector in 1722 celebrated their success by standing over their captives and deriding the chief symbol of English power. The commandeered ship and crewmen remained in the St. John River for thirteen days, the agent re- ported, while his abductors engaged in “dancing and rejoicing with my Colours flying night and day, till the wind had blown them all from the Staff.” After the jeering wound down, the Indians “ordered me to saile down the River and cross the Bay for Menis by a severe Command.”38 Their breaking down of captive sailors exemplified the total authority Wabanaki aimed to establish over their colonial subjects. Nothing so thoroughly stripped prisoners of all pretensions to liberty and power as making them an accessory to the murder of fellow colonists. As Captain Doty’s crew rested at anchor off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1726, several Indians stormed aboard and “fell upon them with their Cutlasses.” The captors then forced Doty and his men to chase down another vessel on the horizon, vowing “they would take her, and kill all the Hands on board and then give him his Vessel again.”39 Warriors could be quite selective in culling English crews for men with cer- tain skills to assist an operation’s immediate needs. Violence and terror, together with discrimination and precision, were critical components of an effective press. After surprising eight English vessels anchored off the Fox Islands in Maine during Father Rale’s War, Indians netted forty prisoners from whom they “reserved the skippers and best sailors to navigate for them.” The rest they killed. The raiders then resumed their expedition with an obedient colonial labor force.40 At the same time that it served as a graveyard of English manhood, the ocean flourished as a nursery of Wabanaki leadership. Seaborne raids afforded sagamores of elite lineage an opportunity to initiate their children into the realm of power politics, the art of warfare, and the nobility of providing for others. Indians had more reason than ever to turn to the water after the late imperial

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conflict exposed the mounting dangers of warfare in the interior and the once-​ profitable fur trade depleted wetlands and forests. In their pursuit of sociopolitical stability, elders mobilized the next generation of Native leaders to assume control of a maritime economy that by the 1720s had become a viable and indeed necessary component of Wabanaki ascendency in the borderlands. English trader John Alden looked on in helpless disbelief as an intergenerational force used his trade sloop as a training ground for cadets in 1720. Eleven Indians, “five of whom were mere children,” stormed the vessel near Minas and “robbed and plundered [it] in a Barbarous manner,” an enraged Governor Phillips of Nova Scotia reported. The prize crew netted a cargo “to the value of Two hundred and Sixty pounds at least.” Another unit from the Shubenacadie River led by “the Chief Called Renne Madogonouit” and “his son in Law Bernard and La Martier, and his Two sons” hijacked an English trading vessel near Minas in May 1744. A party that plundered Stephen Jones’s sloop in 1737 similarly took their lead from “Thoma their Chief, Claude Nicoute, Francois Nicoute, Biscaroon & his Son Paul, Bartlemy the Chief’s Wife’s Son, Jack Ashe & his Son.” Among the warriors from Beaubassin who died attacking an English fleet dispatched to remove French inhabitants from the region in 1750 were “the chiefs of Chebanakady and Beaubassin and the son of the chief of Milleguech.”41 The sea’s transformative power extended far beyond the local. At the same time that it elevated boys to men, the ocean continued to integrate distant communities into a composite Wabanaki confederacy. From the coasts of Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island in the northeast to the islands of Maine in the southwest, Native warriors came together in sea-​raiding units to exploit the sea’s material and social opportunities and pursue their united vision for a Dawnland that would serve the interests of its first people. The interregional crews carrying out this mission personified a collective identity that had been gestating for a century. With their canoes and ships, Indians from disparate communities wove to- gether a broad-​based coalition to control English neighbors. Penobscots from Maine and Malecites from St. John River aimed to enrich themselves and lash the colonial intruders from Nova Scotia when they deployed warriors to Mi’kmaq country in summer 1720. Together the joint force of eight to nine hundred men laid waste to the English fishing community at Canso, seizing and destroying ships, property, and people. Canoes again departed from Maine the following year, fanning out to Mi’kmaq villages at Cape Sables on Nova Scotia’s southern coast, La Heve on the colony’s eastern coast, and Beaubassin on the northern reaches of the Bay of Fundy. At each settlement, Indians coordinated major assaults at the height of the fishing season. Their forces swelled further the following September when fifteen canoes from Miramichi on Cape Breton Island arrived at Minas to assist in the operation. The “large number of Indians”

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subsequently hijacked four English ships, one of which carried furs valued at thirty thousand livres. The three other prizes transported food and merchandise. Hoping to maintain their momentum, three hundred of the most pugnacious warriors pondered how to take down Annapolis Royal.42 But it was at rich and remote colonial sites such as Canso, not the heavily armed fortress-​city of Annapolis Royal, where Indians continued to strike their bonanza. As English fishermen warily rebuilt their lives at Canso after the death and destruction of 1720, a force of sixty Abenaki and Mi’kmaq launched yet an- other assault on the settlement in January 1724. The invasion force “killed three men, a woman, and three or four children” while pillaging houses and an armory. When sixty colonists commissioned by English authorities sailed in pursuit of the attackers, the Indians armed two of their own prize ships with sixty men each and proceeded to seize ten more English fishing vessels. Afloat, not ashore, Wabanaki exposed the weak link of Britain’s imperial ambitions.43 The trans-​Dawnland community also provided a social infrastructure where Indians forged bonds of sympathy and a common commitment to justice. These deeply personal relationships reinforced the imperial network that made sea- borne raiding so devastatingly productive. After colonial fishermen attacked a canoe of Mi’kmaq noncombatants in 1728, for example, the sagamore at nearby Restigouche built support for retributive action by invoking the ties that bound Wabanaki in a web of mutual responsibility. Accompanied by two of his captains, the headman told French officials at Louisbourg that he had been “commissioned by all the chiefs and elders of the nation” to announce “their plan to revenge their brothers’ cruel treatment at the hands of the English.” Louisbourg was simply one stop on an extensive diplomatic mission around the northeast, the sagamore explained, where he would appeal “to all the chiefs and even the Abenaki, for support.” Through long-​distance relationships steeled in the heat of violence, Indians identified and built up their common interests as a singular people.44 The confederacy’s unified response to a confrontation in southern Maine -re vealed just how cohesive it had become by the 1720s. New England militia began hunting Jesuit missionary Sébastien Rale near his post at the Abenaki mission village of Norridgewock in early 1722. Massachusetts authorities ordered the priest’s arrest for instigating violence against the colony among local Indians, who had recently been on amicable terms with New England. Most of Norridgewock’s inhabitants, including Rale, were away hunting when three hundred troops led by Colonel Thomas Westbrook laid siege to the town in March. Unable to find the Jesuit, Westbrook’s soldiers plundered the mission church along with several dwellings. The episode unfolded within a larger context of English encroach- ment in the region as New Englanders had been pushing back onto Wabanaki lands in Maine since the Treaty of Utrecht. Colonial forces eventually murdered, scalped, and mutilated Father Rale and some twenty-​five Indians in another raid

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on Norridgewock in 1724, but it was their destruction of the mission and dese- cration of the chapel two years earlier that galvanized a coordinated response.45 What began in spring 1722 as Father Rale’s War (or Governor Dummer’s War, named after the acting governor of Massachusetts at the time) rapidly escalated from its local roots to a wider conflagration throughout the north- east. Indians from the Kennebec to the Penobscot rivers took to the ocean with renewed ferocity. From Acadia to the northeastern frontier of Massachusetts, the seaborne depredations consumed nearly everything everywhere. The vio- lence that weakened and scattered English colonists at the same time fortified and united Wabanaki settlements. The sea raiders who had been plundering English mariners off Nova Scotia since the Treaty of Utrecht saw themselves locked in a broader campaign for dominion over far more than the nascent colony headquartered at Annapolis Royal. Their assaults proliferated. English subjects caught off guard by the war’s swift expansion beyond Maine quickly fell victim to the coordinated attacks. Indians hijacked a customs collector’s ship in the Bay of Fundy within a month of Colonel Westbrook’s invasion of Norridgewock. When questioned about their motives, the warriors were brutally transparent. “I asked them, is it War,” the abducted agent related. “They answered yes, and after ordered me and my people all aboard of my Boat, and sent us ashore, and then plundered my Vessell to the last degree.” The pressed crew proceeded to sail their captors to “uncommon places” around the bay where they brought “Forty five Indian Warriours on board in Order to joyne more.”46 The pan-​Wabanaki call to arms during Father Rale’s War reinforced local authority structures by expanding the extractive economy the sagamores and war captains had come to depend on for their power and prestige. Leaders fostered integration in large part to augment their status among peers at home. Brandishing axes and knives, thirteen Indians led by Pierre Neptune and Joseph St. Aubin seized the crew of English captain Frederick Blin at the mouth of the Passamaquoddy River in early summer 1722. Neptune, who “called himself Chief,” orchestrated the hostile takeover. Captain Blin put up a modest fight until “one of the Indians clapt his knife to his side.” When the English crew “demanded the Meaning of this Treatment,” Neptune’s forces informed them that “it was Warr and we their prisoners.” Blin asked “what they would Be att, and what they wanted.” Neptune clarified that they were after “his sloop and all his Cargoe.” As they had for nearly a century, headmen pursued the lofty ideals of dominion to satisfy local, and chiefly personal, interests.47 Growing numbers of sagamores commanded their own fleets and entourages by the 1720s. Off the coast of Nova Scotia, an “Indian King who Commanded seven Sloops and Scooners Manned with many Indians well provided” bombarded a trade vessel from Topsham, England, with a fusillade that lasted “several hours” in

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1727. The Penobscot sagamore Espequit did not take lightly to colonists helping themselves to his armada during Father Rale’s War. After three captives from Marblehead made off with one of his ships, the irate headman issued an ultimatum to the Massachusetts government, declaring that he “Expectes his Vessel to be Returnd by ye furst, or satisfaction for her” made instead. Return or remuneration would reestablish right relations between sovereigns and vassals.48 Native communities thus came to value sail as an integral component in the modernization of their project to build a Dawnland dominion. In the decade after the Treaty of Utrecht, Indians captured more English vessels than ever and put them to a wider variety of uses to advance their goals. Sail made many things possible: money, power, fame, glory. The sheer number of ships falling into Indian hands bewildered Europeans. Of small fishing vessels alone, Governor Saint-​Ovide reported from Louisbourg that “they have taken an infi- nite number.” Indians have seized “an infinity” of the English boats, other French officials concurred in their reports to Paris.49

◆ ◆ ◆​ The victims called it piracy. It was a term of convenience, the only tool avail- able for loan from imperial authorities consumed by a wider seaborne epidemic afflicting their valuable sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The so-​called Golden Age of Piracy commenced around 1713, when after twenty-​five years of nearly continuous warfare Britain made peace with its European rivals in the Treaty of Utrecht. Since the Royal Navy had swelled to unprecedented size in the preceding decades, the peace glutted Britain’s mar- itime labor market as sailors transitioned from military service to civilian life. Veteran seamen of the recent wars found few employment options outside of the brutal working conditions aboard merchant vessels. Many turned to lives of theft, preying on the commerce of the nation that abandoned them when it no longer needed their service. The lucrative West Indian trade bore the brunt of their crimes. Britain’s struggle for a solution included waging a propaganda cam- paign to criminalize piracy and cast it as a threat not only to the interests of every imperial subject but also to the economic and political progress of the nation.50 To those in northeastern North America coming to terms with the latest surge of Native sea raids, Britain’s Atlantic-wide​ fight against piracy offered a convenient tactic to combat a long-​standing enemy. Piracy’s rhetorical power could connect Native sea prowess to the more publicized banditry flourishing in other parts of the empire. The looming statelessness of Indian piracy appeared so threatening to the civilized world that Britain hoped it might unite even the bitterest of European rivals. Nova Scotia leaders cultivated French assis- tance in the fight against Wabanaki pirates, looking past the two empires’ his- toric enmities to their common political status. After “some Indians of Cape

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Sables . . . committed divers barbarous acts of hostility upon an English vessell at Newfoundland and some other fishermen that were at anchor at Cape Sables” in 1727, an enraged Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong appealed to the French governor at Louisbourg for help. Condemning the “Robbery & Seizeure of the English Sloop” in such “a piratical Manner Contrary to the Law’s of all Nation’s,” Armstrong invoked France and Britain’s shared status in a polit- ical community. If the “Authors of this Robbery are justly to be deem’d Pirats,” the French were duty-​bound to assist in their apprehension.51 Diplomats from Annapolis Royal traveled to Louisbourg in August 1725 after their colony failed to locate “a Marblehead Shallop piratically taken from the Subjects of Great Brittain by the Indians.” Louisbourg authorities often obliged such supplications if they had an opportunity to ransom the vessels from their native allies. The French also paid heed to their duties as representa- tives of a modern state. By casting Indian sea raiding as the desperate and illicit acts of outlaws, “Illegal and Contrary to the Law of Nations,” English colonists attempted to court a detested yet legitimate imperial rival to combat an enemy whose seafaring prowess they denounced as mere banditry.52 Rendering Wabanaki pirates allowed the English to rationalize their persistent failure to stop Indians from ravaging English subjects at sea. Just as the indigenous American style of land-​based combat confounded European military tacticians, so too did piracy elude European officials struggling to police their maritime jurisdictions. When settlers and fishermen devastated by Indian raids again turned to Boston, London, and Annapolis Royal, authorities wanted them to know that they were all up against a very difficult sort of problem. Massachusetts militia officers recruited volunteers from Piscataqua in July 1724 not to engage a naval power but to go hunting “after indian pirets.” Another militia leader, Samuel Penhallow, explained away the interminable losses of English fishing merchants by reporting that the Indians “resolved to turn pirates” only after settlers stymied their advance in a fair fight ashore. English leaders adopted new terminology to articulate their response to a peculiar Indian problem that had plagued their American colonies, and their Atlantic economy, since the 1670s.53 Pirates were technically criminals in English law, and suspected criminals had to be brought to trial before a court. The Court of Admiralty in London and the Vice-​Courts of Admiralty in the colonies handled all cases of piracy in the empire. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English officials succeeded in bringing only three Wabanaki to justice. The merchant crew who apprehended them nearly paid with their lives. The pirate trio were among a small warrior party who in October 1726 seized Captain Doty’s vessel “as he lay at Anchor in an Harbour at the Eastward” in Nova Scotia. Behind a French habitant who boarded the ship and “snap’d a Pistol at one of” the crewmen, the “Indians fell upon them with their Cutlasses” and impressed Doty and his men into

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service. As the commandeered vessel bore down on another ship, one of Doty’s crewmen who had escaped below deck during the hijacking emerged with guns. The other captives joined him, at which point “three of the Indians jumped out of the Cabbin Window, they being then a Mile or two from the Shore.” The others surrendered. Three Wabanaki prisoners, along with “a Squaw, and two Papooses,” were taken to Boston and brought before a Vice Court of Admiralty on October 4. The Indian pirates, newspapers decreed to Bostoners, “were found Guilty” and “received Sentence of Death.” Days later they swung from the public gallows.54 The struggle to enforce English justice beyond the pale of English authority had a reverse effect in Wabanakia. Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Armstrong ordered “a Copy of the Tryal . . . of the Indians that were hang’d at Boston for piracy” read publicly in the colony. Instead of pacifying Indians and heartening colonists, the proclamation reinforced the bonds of indignation and contempt that united Native communities and animated their plundering campaigns. The execution of three Indians accused of theft represented a flagrant violation of Wabanaki sovereignty. Penobscot buzzed with news “Concerning ye . . . Indian Pirotrs that wear hanged Last fall,” interpreter John Gyles informed Boston.55 Frontier settlers and fishermen consequently endured more of the terrifying uncertainty that defined life in this corner of the northeast. Less than two months after Nova Scotia authorities heralded a copy of the trial, the colony was begging Massachusetts for relief from impending Indian violence against “our Fisher Men in Revenge of ye Justice doen to ye French & Indian Pirates the last Fall.” Colonists then saw their fears realized when “some Indians of Cape Sables,” as Lieutenant Governor Dummer relayed to London, “committed divers bar- barous acts of hostility upon an English vessel . . . and some other fishermen.”56 The timing could not have been worse for Massachusetts. Its finances and morale exhausted by yet another Indian war, the colony had been negotiating a truce with Penobscot sagamore Loron Sagouarrab since the fall of 1725. The headman proved obstinate in his rejection of English claims to territory north- east of the Kennebec. Now he remained even more defiant.57

◆ ◆ ◆​ No one could say they did not see it all coming. Nova Scotia’s first governor put London on high alert immediately after Mi’kmaq warriors reignited their sea raids in 1715. Scarcely a year had passed since the Treaty of Utrecht, and perhaps that was the problem. No one in Annapolis Royal, Boston, or London could stom­ ach the thought of another war. Indians from Cape Sables had become “so in- censed against the English, that they seise and plunder what fishing vessells they can come at,” Samuel Vetch related to the Board of Trade, “and commit the same hostilitys as in open war.” The marine-​warriors launched their offensive “in order to ruin that so noble and valuable fishery upon that coast, which is of so great

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consequence to the Crown.” Vetch did not want the implications of the raids lost on London elites. “Unless some speedy and effectual methods are taken for protecting and encouraging the English fishery,” Britain’s Atlantic project would be turned upside down.58 Then came the frenetic warnings from Boston. Governor Dudley had long since mastered the genre. Indians have “seized Eleven Vessels of ours fishing on that Coast,” he wrote frankly but forebodingly to the Board of Trade, “and made Prisoners most of the fishermen belonging to the said Vessels.” And this prom- ised to be only the beginning. If the board wished to avert disaster they must “secure the Settlements on the Shoar Eastward, and the fishery the whole length of the Coast from Newfoundland to Cape Cod.”59 But fishing magnates were already losing everything. Indians reduced Peter Capon’s bustling operation near Chibuctou to a mountain of wreckage in 1715. Returning to the scene of the disaster, Capon discovered “a great deal of damage done to my Vessells, Stages Warehouses &c by ye Indians,” from “which Damage [I]‌ have lost all this yeares fishing.” Lieutenant Governor Thomas Caulfeild fretted over the magnitude of the loss in a report to Governor Dudley in Boston. Capon, “who is well known on ye Coast . . . suffered very Considerablie” in the as- sault. Massachusetts merchant Sir William Pepperrell fared no better. So critical was his commercial output to the colonial economy that the governor’s council obliged his request for the provincial frigate so he could sail to Cape Sable and “Use all proper Methods to regain his Men & Vessels out of the Indians Hands.”60 As Wabanaki opened another theater of their naval campaign in Maine during Father Rale’s War, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia leaders watched their colo- nies descend to new depths of terror and violence. The calamities suffered by tycoons such as Capon and Pepperrell in 1715 soon characterized life once again for all who made their lives on the water. The prospect of falling victim to Indian sea raiders proved so chilling for the “distressed people in Marblehead” in 1724 that they refused to organize search parties for the countless fathers, sons, and husbands who had gone missing at sea. Panic consumed everyone, especially the “Widdows and fatherless,” colonist John Minot despaired to Governor Dummer from the scene. “Our people here being so very uneasy about so many of their freinds and relations being now in the hands of the Indians are very backward to goe against them in a Hostile manner.” Instead they stayed home and began to “begg” the governor “that there be some emediate measures tacken to redeme our people and Vessels out of their hands.”61 They cried out for help and then they waited and then they kept waiting, just like they had always done. A year passed. By summer 1725 Marblehead residents had nowhere else to turn so they implored Boston to “take into Consideration Our Deplorable Surcomstances” and send “relief” to save the fishery, now in danger “of being wholly Destroy’d & Broken Up.” And then they waited.62

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Massachusetts officials received more disturbing reports from the fishing community of Piscataqua in summer 1724. It was dreadful news: “the fishermen don’t go East of this place or scarce to sea.” Nova Scotia had its own emergencies to worry about. Already by 1722 “the Fishery became Impracticable from the Attacks and Barbarities the Indians made on all Vessels that were a Fishing,” merchant John Elliot wrote to London authorities. “A seizeing upon the Banks thereof with the Vessels they had got possession off,” Indians were poised to topple the fishery and suffocate the colony. The swirling reports greatly “Alarmed the Fishery at Canco,” Nova Scotia’s most profitable operation.63 Inflecting each desperate plea for help was an acquiescence to the unsettling fact of the matter that every colonial settlement was on their own again. The isolation, the helplessness, and the terror got the better of a New Hampshire posse that went to sea in nervous pursuit of Indians during Father Rale’s War. At the moment they caught sight of the enemy, the ambivalent mob “of about forty men well fixed” panicked and fled. The volunteers “fairly came up with one of them,” militia officer Samuel Penhallow reported, “but through cowardice and folly were afraid to engage them.” No one could blame them. The Indians had fortified their rig with “two great guns and four pateraroes [swivel guns].” When a more spirited crew arrived under the command of “Dr. Jackson from Kittery, and Sylvanus Lakeman from Ipswich,” the Indians “cut their shrouds and hindered their pursuit” with the artillery.64 The exceptional colonists who gathered enough fortitude and firepower to hunt Indians at sea quickly became the hunted. After warriors seized “a large schooner with two swivel guns” from the Isles of Shoals, Governor Dummer commissioned a modest sloop and shallop for fishermen hoping to sail in pur- suit. Not long after their departure, the crews “returned with their rigging much damaged by the swivel guns,” beaten, battered, and able to “give no other ac- count of the enemy than that they had gone into Penobscot.” Warriors near Cape Negro in southeastern Nova Scotia paid a surprise visit to a fleet convoying the vessel of Plymouth shipmaster Captain Barns in summer 1725. The Indians commandeered “five Vessels that were his Consorts they being seven in Company,” Boston authorities were soon dismayed to learn. Numbering “about an hundred” including local French settlers, the warriors then “pursued after him and another Vessel but they made their Escape.” The volunteers from Piscataqua who hazarded an attempt at the notorious “indian Privateer” off coastal Maine in July 1724 similarly found themselves being “Chased” for three hours by “a sconer once of marble head” but now “full of Indians Extraordenary well fitted.”65 It was not that authorities lacked concern for common fishermen, merchants, and settlers in their provinces or that they failed to comprehend the gravity of their circumstances. It was that the situation had intensified considerably since its onset in the seventeenth century. Its relentless advance forced governors in

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Massachusetts and Nova Scotia to concede that they were simply incapable of stopping it. They turned to metropolitan officials, preoccupied with another seaborne epidemic afflicting the empire’s busiest trade routes. Eventually they surrendered to the difficult reality that they too were on their own. So they turned to one another, Boston to Annapolis Royal, Annapolis Royal to Boston. And then they turned to places such as Marblehead, Piscataqua, Casco Bay, St. Georges, and Canso, to families paralyzed with fear and starva- tion, and once again asked them to do their best. “I . . . wish it was in my power to make redress to ye Aggreived,” Nova Scotia’s Lieutenant Governor Caulfeild lamented to Governor Dudley in Boston after Indians committed “several hostilities” against English fishermen in the summer of 1715. As their power withered and the aggrieved multiplied over the coming decade, Caulfeild and Dudley’s successors echoed the same desperate wish.66 With what meager resources and manpower they could muster from their colonies, officials struggled to do more than wish away the Wabanaki scourge. They encouraged volunteers and dispatched militia units. They commissioned vessels, arms, and supplies. They authorized scalp bounties. But ultimately these tactics were not working. Time and again Wabanaki sailors out-​paced, out-​maneuvered, and out-​gunned their colonial pursuers in Dawnland waters. Massachusetts officer Colonel Thomas Westbrook confessed to superiors that he “Diligently Searched after the Vessells belonging to this Province (that were taken by the Indians) but Could find none.” After “two Shallops & a Scooner were . . . taken by a Scooner man’d with Indians” in the summer of 1725, Captain Edward Winslow gave chase but the Indians eluded him by tacking “in to the Harbour on the North Side of Monhegan [Island],” over twelve miles off Maine, “which is the Place of their Rondezvouz.” John Minot expressed similar frustrations to the governor of Massachusetts in 1724 after learning that Indians in Maine “have hal’d up our Vessells into the Countrey” where it was difficult to find them and virtually impossible to find them safely. The two gunboats commissioned by Nova Scotia’s Governor Phillips to scour the fishing banks for Indians in fall 1722 met a similar fate. When the sixty-​man patrol opened fire on a vessel crewed by fifteen marine-​warriors, the Indians defended their craft “perfectly and made a vigorous resistance for two hours,” killing several of the English volunteers and eventually escaping to shore.67 Neither could the fishing industry count on their government to secure the re- lease of stolen ships through diplomatic channels. The political priorities of a colony drained by yet another convulsion of violence and theft did not always harmonize with the property interests of individual fishermen and merchants. When leaders from Wabanakia and Massachusetts convened in Boston to discuss the terms of an armistice during Father Rale’s War, English officials counseled locals not to bring up the ship topic around any Indians for fear of spoiling a precious opportunity

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and strengthening the enemy’s bargaining position. Upon hearing rumors of the native envoys in Boston, Marblehead fishing captain Samuel Stacey informed the governor’s office “That they have one of my Schooners in their Hands, which they took from me some Time ye Summer before last.” John Chapman, another Marblehead captain, also “had a vessel & servant with them.” The two had attempted to redeem their possessions at an earlier conference but were stonewalled by the colony’s commissioners. Broaching the subject would only give them the upper hand, Stacey and Chapman were told, “especially when they were suing for a Peace with us.” Offering a ransom would only endanger more fishermen.68

◆ ◆ ◆​ It took the English until the summer of 1727 to make tangible headway in their struggle to stem the tide. With conciliatory peace terms offered to Penobscot sagamore Loron Sagouarrab, colonial diplomats convinced Wabanaki to call off their campaigns. Headmen finally saw English willingness to comply with their colonies’ prescribed roles as Dawnland subjects. Massachusetts released native prisoners held in Boston since 1720, lifted its ban on Jesuits in Maine, constructed dwellings at the garrison of St. Georges for Indian traders, and established a new truck house on the Salmon River for the community of Pigwacket. Perhaps most symbolically, Governor Dummer supported the rebuilding of Norridgewock, even supplying new furnishings for the chapel to replace those destroyed by Colonel Westbrook’s forces in 1724. Indians resettled the community with another missionary a few years later. By modernizing and redoubling efforts toward their blue-​water strategy for a Native northeast, Wabanaki exhausted Britain’s financial and human resources in the American northeast. Loron and the confederacy’s other headmen knew it.69 Indians also knew that they were not in a position to demand much more. The war had taken a toll on their communities, too, most notably with the loss of Norridgewock. New England’s land-​based operations displaced smaller communities southwest of the Penobscot River, forcing their inhabitants to flee northeast to the headquarters at Penobscot or northwest to the French mis- sion villages on the St. Lawrence. Indians near the sparsely populated English colony of Nova Scotia suffered far fewer losses in the conflict. The pervasive instability in Maine, however, frayed the political ties that bound them to their kin in the southwest. As Loron and other headmen from the Kennebec to the Penobscot convinced themselves that peace with Massachusetts was in their best collective interest, Indians in Nova Scotia found themselves bereft of the support sustaining their operations against the occupiers at Annapolis Royal. Wabanakia’s increasingly regional geopolitics compelled native strategists to again reassess the scope of their eastern strategy.

Figure 7.1 Mi’kmaq encampment at Tuft’s Cove, outside Halifax, circa 1837, attributed to William Eager. Wabanaki maintained a strong coastal presence in southeastern Nova Scotia long before Britain began construction of its new colonial capital there in 1749. Courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives.